


Aftercare

by vega_voices



Series: You Are Like That, [9]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/M, Thirty Days, fic helps soothe the hurts Voyager hands out sometimes, how does a 25 year old show still matter this much?, post episode, these two idiots just find their way into your heart and stay there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:22:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26341831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vega_voices/pseuds/vega_voices
Summary: The words hit hard, and the desperate need to deconstruct their relationship moved to a back burner. He loved her. “I’m just an engineer,” she argued.
Relationships: Tom Paris/B'Elanna Torres
Series: You Are Like That, [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1861696
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	Aftercare

**Title:** Aftercare   
**Author:** vegawriters  
 **Fandom:** Star Trek: Voyager  
 **Series:** You Are Like That,   
**Paring:** B’Elanna Torres/Tom Paris  
 **Rating:** E  
 **Timeframe:** Thirty Days  
 **Disclaimer:** Star Trek is the property of CBS, etc. and the Powers that Be are the ones that make the decisions we get to go back and explain later. Don’t worry, I don’t make any money off of this. But, I’m always willing to change that … 

**Summary:** _The words hit hard, and the desperate need to deconstruct their relationship moved to a back burner. He loved her. “I’m just an engineer,” she argued._

**Heart-Mirror**  
 _A little spit on the heart-mirror -  
like my father, the gambler,  
spitting into his palms  
then rubbing them together  
before he lets go   
the dice. I am rolling  
through stars  
just thinking about it.   
And my heart, rubbed clean  
with maniac luck,  
gets what it wanted  
for once: this child’s moon  
and three sentinel lovers. _  
-by Tess Gallagher 

Later, when this was over, when she’d felt his body against her and inside of her, after the dermal regenerator had patched the worst of the bite marks and she’d braced her sprained wrist herself, she’d tell him. She’d admit that Janeway had given her permission for one five-minute visit and she hadn’t taken advantage of the time because she was still working out her own questions about Moset and Tom’s role in begging Janeway to save her life. 

Later, they’d talk. They’d talk about Monea, and Moset, and she’d even let him in some more about how empty she’d been feeling for so long and how honestly, being separated from him for 30 days had helped her put some things in perspective. 

Later. Over time, unraveling all of the knots that made up the tapestries of history they’d dragged into this relationship, they’d smooth out the rough spots and find ways to see each other clearly again. 

Later. Right now, all that mattered was this. Connection. Finding passion born less from desperation and more from knowing they were there for each other. This was not about fear, not about seeking reassurance. This was about resolution. 

He’d done exactly what she expected, what she wanted. She’d moved engineering shifts around so they were both coming off duty at 0700. As it was, she’d barely had time to brush her hair and change before he stalked into her quarters and backed her right back into the nearest bulkhead and sank his teeth into her collarbone. Freshly washed, antsy from his first shift back, he’d pressed all of his nervous energy into her and it was perfect. Fast, hard, angry. They’d taken out their mutual rage at Janeway’s absolute overreaction on each other’s bodies. Ripping clothes aside, pushing into each other. 

Kahless and Lukara, she loved this man and she was proud of him and she stood by him always. Even when she didn’t agree with him, but especially when he spun her around and yanked her dress up over her hips (why bother with underwear on a day like today), and stepped between her thighs, pushing into her so roughly she could only scream his name as he thrust his way to both of their completion. 

Only after, spent in her bed, did she let herself catch her breath and look at him, really look at him. After, later, they would talk. 

Slowly, B’Elanna rose up on an elbow and stroked her finger down Tom’s cheek. She’d left her own mark there, and the bite was starting to swell. “I’m proud of you, Tom,” she murmured. “It was a move worthy of the maquis. Reminded me of why I joined, and told me why you did.” 

He returned the gesture and B’Elanna hissed as the tips of his fingers trailed over the mark on her cheek. She saw the questions in his eyes, the deeper conversations they should trust themselves to have, and allowed herself the silence. There was so much ground to cover. “I missed you so much,” was all he could say, she heard what he meant, and how it was about more than the thirty days away from each other, separated by decks and force fields and a captain angrier about being shown up than about his actions. 

A groan escaped B’Elanna’s body as Tom pushed her back into the pillows and bent to bite her nipple. “I gathered …” was all she had the brain to say before giving her body back to him,, realizing how he didn’t want to talk right now. It was okay. 

“Tell me what you thought about,” he said, his mouth against her solar plexus, his teeth grazing her skin. “Show me how you missed me.” Her legs opened to his request and a heavy hand landed on her inner thigh, squeezing hard enough to leave a bruise. “Vivid detail, B’Elanna,” he murmured. “What did you think about?”

“You,” she murmured, tugging on his hair so he’d look up at her. “Every night, I’d lie here and curse all of this. Some nights, I’d curse you, too.” they both laughed, but he took her hand in his and placed it between her legs, sinking into the damp curls. It wasn’t a lie. She hadn’t spent the entire month trapped in some languid fresh hell of questioning every decision. Her nights, her few spare hours of rest, had been filled with images of her lover, and she’d filled the silence of her quarters when she called his name. 

“Tell me,” he said again. And she knew it was about more than sex and reclamation. He’d felt isolated and forgotten and needed to know that when she was fingering herself to sleep, his name had been on her lips. 

“I’d come in after shift,” she said, “and just crawl into bed. Harry and Chakotay tried to keep me occupied, but I just wanted to be here. It was quiet.” She’d tell him about the video she’d made for him later. 

“What did you wear?”

“Some nights, your favorite nightgown. The blue one that barely stays on.” She groaned as he bent to kiss the swell of her breast and their linked fingers moved against her. “Some nights, that red pj set you got for me down on Mari.” She gasped as his mouth encased her nipple and he bit, hard, setting off the slightest tremors in her body. “Some nights, I’d just be naked and sprawled out here, missing you.”

“I’d dream of you naked,” he said. “But I was never alone enough to do anything about it. I wanted the force field turned for privacy but all they ever did was dim the lights.” 

“Not once?” B’Elanna asked, guiding his long fingers against her, sliding through the slick wetness between her thighs. “You never reached into your uniform and grasped your cock and imagined me on my knees with your hands in my hair? You never turned your back to the guard and let it happen?”

“Almost, once,” he confessed, leaning down to bite her earlobe. B’Elanna hissed and arched her back off the mattress. “I rolled over and almost did it, but it was a mess I didn’t want to clean up and the damned security officer didn’t deserve the show.” He sucked the pulse point on her neck hard enough that she felt a pop in her skin. “Tell me,” he groaned again, sliding a finger into her. “Tell me what you thought of.” 

B’Elanna whimpered and pushed against his hand. Tom nipped her neck again. “I’d lie here and imagine you coming in after shift. Tired and stiff from sitting in that seat for ten hours. Cranky and looking to blow off steam.”

“Rough, hmmm? Always rough?”

“Only because I was so angry.” She gasped as he stroked her inner walls. “But we’ll get to gentle later.”

“What did I do?”

“You’d bite my neck, claiming me.” He did again, hard enough that he felt the skin break under his teeth. Her body tensed and she felt her blood rising all over again. How was it that mating with this human brought out her most Klingon impulses? “Mating me,” she sighed her own confession into the bite. 

His only acknowledgement was a slight chuckle, “Happy to, but aren’t there oaths involved?”

“Later,” she groaned. He pushed another finger into her body. B’Elanna cried out and her nails dug so hard into his back she felt the skin break all over again. “My go to,” she moaned, “when I just wanted to get off, when I wasn’t lingering …. You’d drop to your knees in front of me and force my legs open and your mouth would be on me. I love,” she gasped again, “how you do that to me. How you don’t give me time to think sometimes. You’re just there and your tongue is moving against me and in me and I …” she cried out as he tweaked her bundle of nerves between his fingers. “I feel worshiped, Tom.” 

“It’s because I worship you,” he murmured, nipping at her neck. “I don’t need Kahless or God. I’ve got you. And even when we’re at odds with each other and fighting, it’s only because I worry I don’t measure up to someone who is worthy of you.” Another nip. “You are a queen, B’Elanna Torres.” 

The words hit hard, and the desperate need to deconstruct their relationship moved to a back burner. He loved her. “I’m just an engineer,” she argued. 

“Someday, you’ll understand.” He moved his hand and rolled over on top of her, settling between her legs. “Keep going,” Tom ordered as he reached between them and guided himself back into her body. B’Elanna rose to meet him. 

“And just before I’d come, as you always do, you’d pull back and you’d pull me onto your lap and I’d ride you, hard, until you bit me and forced me onto my back and took everything …” she gasped as he pushed deep into her again. 

“I only take what you give,” he moaned. “I’m just lucky that you give me everything.” 

And she did, bringing his mouth back to hers for a kiss that drew blood. Her legs wrapped as high around his hips as she could go and Tom pounded into her, slowing only when one of them came close to flying into oblivion, until finally she screamed his name and dug her nails into his arm. Tom grabbed her wrists so hard she felt something snap and held her hands above her head while he rode her orgasm to his own completion. 

“Fuck …” Tom murmured as he pulled out and sat up a bit. “God, that was … wow.” He ran his hand down her leg and met her eyes. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she gasped, sitting up. 

Tom moved from the bed to the bathroom, came back with a washcloth and some oil, and settled with his back against the bulkhead supports of the bed. Gently, he guided her to sit back between his legs and ran the washcloth over her shoulders and neck. They both hissed as he dabbed at the bites and B’Elanna chuckled a bit. “The dermal regenerator is in the drawer for later. But leave it all for now.”

“Just cleaning off the blood a bit,” he shook his head. “That was intense, B’Elanna.” 

She eased against him, resting her back against his chest, and sighed when his arms circled her. “That was about the most Klingon I’ll get.”

“Still not all that scary,” he said, his words punctuated with a kiss. “And I missed you. Not your human side, not your Klingon side. You.” 

“I missed you, too.” Tears touched her eyes and she leaned her head back to rest in the crook of his neck. His hands resumed their tender ministrations, using the washcloth to wipe away some of the lingering fluids that cooled on her body. B’Elanna opened her legs so he could finish the job and hissed at the touch of the cloth against her chafed thighs. 

They rested in silence for a while, listening to the white noise of the ship around them, before B’Elanna took the cloth and turned. She knelt between Tom’s thighs and returned his gentle favor, wiping away drying fluids and soothing where she’d bitten and scratched. The all too obvious evidence of her rougher side always jolted her stomachs, but Tom wasn’t scared of her. She was the one that was scared, and she had to remember that. Dropping the cloth to the side of the bed, B’Elanna took the oil, poured some into her hands, and massaged it into his chest and arms. His back, they both knew, would need the regenerator before they slept, but neither was about to move to get it. Satisfied, she curled back up against him and settled with his arms around her, waiting for him to speak. 

“I transcribed a letter to my father,” he finally said. “Told him how I ended up in the brig. About the Monean situation. About you, and how my joining the maquis wasn’t a fluke and if I hadn’t had my head so far up my ass when I did join, I’d really have been there for the cause and not to pay my bar bills.” 

“I’ve been proud of you so many times over the last five years,” she murmured. “But when you took that stand for something you really believed in, I saw in force the man I fell in love with.” 

“Janeway question you?”

She snorted. “I think she’d have confined me to my quarters if she could have.”

“Well, you did encourage me.” 

“I encouraged you to be yourself,” B’Elanna said. Kissing him again, she moved away from the safety of his arms to get the regenerator and a brace to calm the throbbing in her wrist. She secured the brace and moved back to her lover. “Sit forward. Let me fix your back before these get infected. I dug pretty deep.” 

Tom obeyed and B’Elanna trailed her fingertips along the freshly healed skin as the regenerator did its work. Finally, she moved the device to Tom’s cheek, leaning in to kiss him before soothing the bruise away with the sonic waves. “I wish it was uniform code to wear that after you do it to me,” Tom said, kissing her as he took the regenerator and returned the favor. 

“I’m still on the fence,” she admitted. “I like knowing that any of those groupies who want you can’t have you and the evidence is right there … but God …” she rolled her eyes. “I just get so sick of the ‘B’Elanna and her Klingon side’ crap.” 

His touch was gentle and B’Elanna met his gaze, kissing his palm as he cupped it around her cheek. “I can’t pretend to know what that’s like for you. I think I tried once and I sounded like an idiot.” 

“What,” she teased, “you mean the time I told you how I used to hide my ridges because the kids made fun of me and you brought up the haircuts from your dad?”

He laughed and she was glad he could see the humor in her calling him out on it. “I really wish you didn’t remember that lapse in judgement.” 

“Honestly,” she shrugged, “the fact that you were willing to try to empathize with me while I was a wreck of a … human … meant a lot.” She reached over to her bedside table and put the regenerator next to the oil. “Are you hungry?” she asked as she slipped out of bed. “We never did eat.” He looked uncomfortable and she nodded, realizing his rations may not have been restored yet. “Use my replicator code.”

After taking care of herself, including washing her face and running a comb through her hair, B’Elanna emerged to find Tom sitting at the table in just a pair of boxers. A simple dinner of tomato soup for him and a salad for her was before him, but he wasn’t eating. She slid her red nightgown over her head and moved to him, resting her hands on his shoulders. “We never talk about, you know, you being in prison.” 

He caught her hand and kissed her fingers. “When I was at the penal colony, I did all this research on what Earth prisons used to be like. The prisons and jails of the 20th century …” he shuddered. “But a prison is still a prison and the brig is still the brig and …” he shrugged. “There’s a part of me that truly believes if you break the rules, you have the consequences laid out for you and you serve them.”

“But?” B’Elanna moved to run her hand through his hair. 

“The rest of me wonders what we’re doing wrong when so much of security, so much of society is built around it.” He let out a long sigh and looked at his tomato soup. “You know, the replicators never get it right.” 

“I know.” B’Elanna dropped a kiss to his hair and moved over to her salad. She was sore and chafed in all the right places and she couldn’t help the sigh as she sat down. Silence descended as they ate and despite her need to hear him talk, to hear him ramble about anything, B’Elanna let Tom process while they ate. 

When his soup was half-finished, Tom rose and walked over to the viewport. B’Elanna watched him stare at the stars, wondering where his brain had wandered to. “You know,” he said with a long sigh, “it’s been a crazy few months.”

Having a feeling where he was going, B’Elanna knew she had a choice. She could lure him back to bed and ignore this conversation, she could start the fight that would set them on their usual path and cycle, or she could go to him and remind him that not everything had to be solved in one off-shift of sex and conversation. Opting for the latter, she rose and crossed the room, sliding her arm around his waist and leaning against him. Outside, the starfield zipped by in streaks of blue and white and gold. “Yeah, it has,” she finally said. 

A long, slow breath escaped him and he shook his head. “That damned Void, your issues on the holodeck, you almost dying, my being in the brig … I tell you, B’Elanna, if we do get home, I just want to find the most boring colony ever and settle down with you and make love to you the rest of my life.” 

She chuckled and kissed his shoulder. “You’d need a ship to pilot eventually. But I appreciate the sentiment.” 

“You’re really doing okay?” he asked. “I mean it, don’t dodge the question here.” 

B’Elanna looked back out at the stars, unsure how to answer the question, before she settled on brutal honesty. “I was pissed for a while when you were in the brig. Pissed at the Captain, at you, at myself for any encouragement I had. Being alone forced me to actually think about the stuff I …” she sighed. “I didn’t have you to pick a fight with when my defenses were all raised.” She slid out of his embrace and settled on the couch. Tom joined her. “Let’s not pretend everything is perfect. I still miss my friends, and I’m still having a lot of trouble sitting with the Doctor using Moset’s research to save my life. Part of me still doesn’t trust that you aren’t looking to run off with the next shiny test shuttle that comes along, and all it takes to lose each other is a bad ion storm hitting a shuttle on an away mission.” He was quiet. She took his hands. “But … I mean … you’re here. I’m here. And we’ll figure out the rest as it happens, right?” 

His eyes sparkled just a bit as he leaned in to kiss her. B’Elanna sighed and let him gently pull her into his lap. His fingers moved up under the statin of her nightgown, and she straddled him. “I love you,” he whispered against her skin. “And you’re right,” his murmured as his fingertips grazed her hip, “we’ll figure out the rest day-by-day.”

“You know,” she gasped as his touch danced along the inside of her thigh, “if you think about it, we could have eventually fallen in love in the Alpha Quadrant too … if …” she let her head fall back as he pressed his lips to her collarbone. “If … you hadn’t been arrested.” 

He laughed and she joined him. “It’s just a reminder,” Tom said as he stood up, keeping her in his arms. A month of nothing to do but work out had definitely added to his ability to carry her across the room. Which he did now, bringing her back to bed, and gently, so gently helping her out of her nightgown. As he shucked his boxers and stretched out with her on the bed, Tom pressed his lips against her shoulder. “It’s a reminder that we’re supposed to be together,” he murmured. “That for everything the universe gets wrong, sometimes, it gets something right.” 

“Doesn’t strike you as weird that you and me, that’s the thing the universe got right?”

“Come on, B’Elanna,” Tom laughed as he helped her straddle his hips, “you’re the one who reads the romance novels. Don’t you know the one constant in the universe is this?”

She giggled and bent to kiss him. “I never argue when someone makes my point for me.” 

His grin could have powered the warp core for a month. “Yeah, you do,” he teased. 

B’Elanna shut him up with a kiss. Later, tomorrow, they could talk more. They could argue about something stupid. They could find their groove and wonder about ways to change it. Right now, they had this.


End file.
